CHENNAI: After denying cases of cholera for several days before medical reports provided confirmation, Chennai Corporation now appears to be exceeding its brief in dealing with the media. A senior TOI photographer, who tried to click photographs of patients in the Communicable Diseases Hospital at Tondiarpet had his camera snatched by joint commissioner (health) Pooja Kulkarni. She then abused the journalist.

On Friday, when 22 more patients were admitted with diarrhoea in the city, mayor Saidai Duraisamy invited journalists to accompany him to CDH where he wanted to show them "how well patients are recovering and how good our hospital is." At the hospital, reporters were told to surrender their mobile phones and cameras.

When the corporation photographer started taking pictures from the door, TOI photographer C Suresh Kumar took the cue and began clicking through a window. Without warning, Kulkarni snatched the camera from him and threatened to remove the microchip unless he deleted the pictures. Even as the mayor tried to pacify the officer saying, "leave it, we are not hiding anything," Kulkarni kept shouting that Kumar was "intruding on the patient's privacy." Later, corporation commissioner D Karthikeyan wrote to TOI, complaining that the journalist showed "disrespect for patient privacy."

It is important to note that patient privacy, as a matter of ethics, is observed in cases of diseases that carry a social stigma. TOI's efforts to report on the cholera situation are to present and analyse standards of public sanitation and hygiene. The commissioner and his overzealous colleague may be aware that in the past the corporation has taken journalists on conducted tours of spruced-up civic hospitals where officials and politicians have posed for pictures with patients, regardless of their medical condition. In any case, on Friday, none of the patients or their relatives protested.

Incidentally, by the corporation's own admission, 20 more patients were admitted to CDH and two to Kilpauk Medical College on Friday. So far four have tested positive for cholera and 312 diagnosed with acute diarrhoeal disease.